I would be grateful for the advice/comments of anyone here who has knowledge or experience of removing a lawn and replacing it with a gravelled parking area.
During this summer I am thinking of levelling out my front garden and covering it with gravel and raised beds. Other than just levelling, covering with some heavy-duty landscaping fabric and a couple of inches of gravel, is there anything else that I need to do - or should be aware of?
I did mine last year. First of all visit
A couple of inches of gravel on fabric won't work for parking cars on. You need a base of well compacted type 1 aggregate topped by 18mm gravel.
we did ours but took it all back up, fed up with the cats using it as a toilet !
Thanks for your help, but is that 18mm of gravel or gravel 18mm in size
- if the latter what depth of gravel should there be?
Sorry, that wasn't clear. You can buy gravel in 10mm & 18mm size. The 10mm means 'up to & including 10mm' and the 18mm 'from 10mm to & including 18mm' . The smaller gravel is a right pain, the larger tends to stay put.
My front garden is half garden & half drive with a path down the middle. The garden bit is 4m x 4m and the drive 4m x 5.5m.
On the drive bit I excavated down about 150mm & used about 5 tonnes of type
1, compacted down in two layers. On top of this is about 2.6 tonne of 18mm gravel which ends up about 35mm thick. We park cars on this with no rutting and it's a solid surface to walk on, with virtually no weed growth.The garden bit just has 2 tonnes of 18mm on weed control fabric. This is also about 35mm thick, but is soft & squishy to walk on - like a gravel beach. We get some weeds coming through around the edges, but they are sitting ducks for weed killer.
A cheap surface to put down, always looks OK, no maintenance, easy to repair if stained, non slip (even in snow) & apparently burgulars don't like it cos it makes a noise.
Thanks again. I just looked at the paving expert website you recommended
- very useful indeed.
Cheers.
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